The tragic hero and the outlaw (with personality)

by David Benjamin

“Dick Clark, the producer and host of the immensely popular television show ‘American Bandstand,’ decided that the lyrics of ‘Stagger Lee,’ which involved gambling and ended with a fatal barroom shooting, were too violent for his show. Mr. Price, ever the savvy businessman, recorded a new version in which the song’s rivals are fighting over a woman and make up at the end…”
— Obituary by Joe Coscarelli, NY Times

MADISON, Wis. — One of the harder-to-find songs in Lloyd Price’s rock ’n’ roll repertoire is his infectious 1959 love song, “Personality.” I spent years searching for a golden oldies anthology that includes the ear-worm refrain that “… I’ll be a fool for you, ’cause you’ve got… smile (with personality), charm (with personality), love (with personality), plus you’ve got a great big heart!”

Lloyd Price, who died this month at the un-rocker age of 88, scored his first Top Forty hit as a teenager in 1952, with “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy.” Producer Art Rupe of Specialty Records recalled the tension that haunted the radio airwaves in those days: “[‘Lawdy, Miss Clawdy’] was the first Black record that wasn’t intended to be a white record — it became a white record, versus the previous Black records which were designed for the white market.”

Well into the 1950s, there was white radio and Black radio, an apartheid enforced by broadcasters, record companies and the Jim Crow South, where so many Black artists were born and so many records produced. Largely by happenstance, Price was among the first Black musicians to crack white radio — a phenomenon referred to as “crossover” — because listeners, and often the disc jockey, didn’t know Price was Black. He didn’t “sound Black.” Nor did Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke and even Little Richard (although “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally” ring pretty darn Sugar Hill to me).

I picture kids, circa 1957, at an all-white high-school sock hop in Tupelo, dancing and romancing on the basketball court to “You Send Me,” unaware that their makeout music is the voice of a guy who wouldn’t be allowed to set foot in the gym, even if he offered to sing a live encore and tapdance to “Only Sixteen.”

The real irony, of course, is that the heritage of pop music in America is inextricably entangled in Black roots. We would have neither blues nor jazz, nor any vestige of rock ’n’ roll — no disco, no punk, no grunge, no hip-hop, no heavy metal, no talking-blues folksingers like Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie, and even a heck of a lot less country-western — if a musical renaissance had not emerged in the 1870s from the oral, gospel and poetic traditions that evolved among the freed slaves of the South after the Civil War.

Joe Coscarelli’s obituary notes that Lloyd Price’s cover of the classic “Stagger Lee” reached No. 1 on the charts in ’59. Price didn’t write “Stagger Lee.” No one did. Like its companion tale, about John Henry, the saga of “Stacker Lee” grew from a postbellum era when precious few Black folks could read or write, but all of ’em could sing — gospel hymns, work chants, lullabies and laments in African rhythms that had not died through 250 years of bondage.

I got interested in the myths of post-Civil War Black America partly through an Elektra album recorded by Josh White (another really hard-to-find record). The record’s highlight is a talking/singing rendition of “John Henry” that Josh stretches out for 24 minutes. I found an even longer — and, of course, different — version of John Henry’s heartbreak in a rare book by folklorist Roark Bradford.

Here’s a brief summary.

John Henry was real. He was a railroad man, one of the few “professions” available to freed slaves immediately after the Civil War.

“Workin’ on the railroad,” sings Josh White, “a dollar and a dime day. Give my woman the dollar, and throw the dime away.”

True to his songs, John Henry was a steel-drivin’ man, carving tunnels through granite mountains with a sledgehammer and a carbon-steel chisel. His moment of glory, according to lyric and legend, occurred during the digging and blasting of the Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O Railroad in West Virginia, around 1871.

Cutting a hole through a mountain was murderous labor. John Henry’s job was to chip away a crawlspace, just large enough to squeeze his body, above the planned tunnel, which still consisted of solid rock. After hammering his way a dozen feet or so into that claustrophobic crescent of grime, rock-dust and carbon dioxide, John Henry had to drill down — with little space to swing a hammer — fashioning holes into which the demolition crew could stack sticks of dynamite. By hand and muscle, John Henry made room for white men to touch a fuse and blow the rockface to smithereens. Then he got to pick up the smithereens.

According to the song, John Henry faced the loss of this hellish job when a “steam drill” was introduced as a labor-saving device. To rescue his livelihood, John Henry had to win a race against the machine.

There are a hundred versions of that contest, but the best historical accounts give the victory to John Henry, because the steam drill swiftly inhaled so much dust and grit in the tomblike crawlspace that it overheated and broke down.

John Henry is a tragic figure in American myth not because he got beat by the Industrial Revolution, but because when he got home from the tunnel — according to Josh White and his guitar — John Henry’s wife and only love, Julie Ann, was gone. She had run off with a fancy man.

The great original archetypes of the Black mythos are celebrated in songs that birthed the Blues. John Henry, the tragic figure, is honest and devoted. He works cruelly hard, obeys the white overseer and takes his dollar home to his woman. But while he’s away, other men tempt Julie Ann with easy money, with charm, with the bright lights of New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis.

Those ports, on the Mississippi River, were the habitat of John Henry’s nemesis, the outlaw ex-slave, the “stacker” who rippled with muscle and toted immense bales of cotton from dock to riverboat, from riverboat to wagon. “Stacker Lee,” the namesake of a hundred songs, was the strongest and meanest of them all — so valued by cotton jobbers that he could spit in the white man’s eye. Stacker Lee squandered his pay as soon as the eagle flew — drinking, gambling, whoring, fighting, stealing other men’s women and, eventually, killing.

The story of “Stagger Lee” shooting Billy the Lion was a founding legend. But more songs, and more anti-heroes followed. Women were drawn to the Black outlaw — tall, glistening, hard and dangerous. Josh White recites the epitaph of a typical larger-than-life villain, Sam Hall, standing defiant on the gallows: “Oh, I killed a man, ’tis said. Oh, tis said. Hell, I split his bloody head, and I left him there for dead. God damn his eyes…”

Ever since John Henry and Stacker Lee rose Homerically from the ashes of slavery, they’ve been regularly reborn in folklore, fiction, music and real life. The great American opera, Porgy and Bess, has its tragic John Henry in Porgy, who loses Bess to Sportin’ Life, an updated revival of Stacker Lee. The ghost of John Henry appears in the Rev. King, chipping away at the granite of racism while his insouciant contemporary, Muhammad Ali — tall, glistening, hard and dangerous — struts and mocks the white man. If the latest gangsta-rap star evokes Stacker Lee or Sam Hall, Barack Obama — his arc of history shaped prophetically like the granite crescent at the ceiling of the Big Bend Tunnel — is haunted by John Henry.

The myth revives. The struggle seems endless. But listen. In the background, “a roaring, epic, rag-time tune” insinuates an alluring negritude into the staid bastions of whiteness — getting its daughters to shimmy and prance — because, unlike dad and the vicar, they’ve got “personality, walk (with personality), talk (with personality), smile (with personality), charm (with personality)…”